Experts Discuss the Archiving Issues of Electronic Documents

On 16-17 June, the Document Lifecycle Management (DLM) Forum members met in Riga to discuss the information policy and governance issues in the EuropeanUnion.

At the meeting, the experts focused on such topics as the information policy and governance, its standards and risk management; shared best practice on information governance and discussed e-archiving issues.

The main discussion was on the archiving of electronic documents. The experts of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands shared their best practice on this topic. The participants of the discussion concluded that the collaboration and understanding between IT experts and archivists should be improvedas the archive specialists often do not have sufficient IT knowledge, but the IT experts lack the understanding of the specifics of archiving.

Experienced professionals also shared information on "MoReq2010" specification implementation and subsequent addition of requirements for archiving electronic documents. They provided information on the development of a unified document transfer package specification. The specification will be available for IT enterprises to prepare electronic documents for storingin the archives. Also, the participants presented the progress on the development of specifications fordatabase archiving, implemented by DLM Forum’s E-ARK project.

The main conclusion of the meeting on the development of package and database archiving specifications was that the specifications should correspondmore to the common opportunities of the archives and the IT field.

The meeting brought together 92 participants from EU Member States, Norway, USA and Oman. Several Latvian organisations, IT companies, students andacademic staff.

The members of DLM Forum Foundation meet twice every year and these meetings are traditionally hosted by the country holding the EU presidency. This time the meeting took place in Riga, at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Latvia.